


Five Ways of Looking at A Funeral

by Nightdog_Barks



Category: House M.D.
Genre: 5 Things, Episode Related, Family, Family Secrets, Gen, Japanese Character(s), Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-29
Updated: 2008-10-29
Packaged: 2017-10-18 05:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/185525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightdog_Barks/pseuds/Nightdog_Barks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times that Gregory House has attended a funeral.  1,431 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways of Looking at A Funeral

**Author's Note:**

> This story references some of the events of episodes 2.17, "All In," and 5.04, "Birthmarks." It is AU.

_**_House_ ficlet: Five Ways of Looking at A Funeral**_  
 **STATUS:** Posted to [](http://housefic.livejournal.com/profile)[**housefic**](http://housefic.livejournal.com/) on 10/27/08  
 **TITLE:** Five Ways of Looking at A Funeral  
 **AUTHOR:** [](http://nightdog-writes.livejournal.com/profile)[**nightdog_writes**](http://nightdog-writes.livejournal.com/)  
 **CHARACTERS:** House, various canon characters, OCs, Wilson  
 **RATING:** PG-13  
 **WARNINGS:** No.  
 **SPOILERS:** Yes, for episode 5.04, "Birthmarks"  
 **SUMMARY:** Five times that Gregory House has attended a funeral. 1,431 words.  
 **DISCLAIMER:** Don't own 'em. Never will.  
 **AUTHOR NOTES:** This story references some of the events of episodes 2.17, "All In," and 5.04, "Birthmarks." It is AU.  
 **BETA:** My intrepid First Readers. Many thanks to [](http://pintsizeninja.livejournal.com/profile)[**pintsizeninja**](http://pintsizeninja.livejournal.com/) for supplying a partial transcript of "Birthmarks."

  
 **Five Ways of Looking at A Funeral**

 _As though all stories began  
With someone dying._  
\-- from "Poem With Refrains," by Robert Pinsky (1940 - )

 _(One)_

The first funeral Greg ever attends is that of his Uncle Peter. Greg is six; Uncle Peter had _been_ fifty-two, felled by what the adult Greg now knows was a subarachnoid hemorrhage but at the time had seemed simply a bolt from the blue. The casket is open, and Greg's dad hoists him up for a better look.

"It'll be good for you," he says. "Learn early to look death in the eye."

Greg looks, and what he sees doesn't impress him. Of course, his concept of _death_ isn't fully formed yet -- _death_ is where his goldfish go, and his friend Jake Vandersee's dog after it got hit by a car, and Katie Wexford, who'd been in the grade ahead of him and had gotten leukemia. _Death_ means you go somewhere and don't come back, and Uncle Pete sure looks like he's not coming back from wherever he's gone. Still, it's the closest Greg has ever been to _death_ , and so he reaches out to touch it. And he can't _quite_ reach, and so he huffs out an impatient breath and maybe he kicks a little and maybe his dad isn't holding him _quite_ as securely as he thought he was, and ...

Greg falls into the coffin, sprawling in a loose-limbed gaggle of arms and legs right on top of Uncle Pete.

And while it _is_ the first time Greg has been this close to death, face to face in the destroyer's own abode -- he figures, even at six, that it won't be the last.

  
 _(Two)_

Eight years later, House watches as his friend Daisuke picks his father's bones from the cremated ashes, using a pair of chopsticks to separate the remains and carefully drop them into the waiting urn.

Not that there's really that much to recover, House thinks. Captain Jiro Matsuyama has been immolated once already, killed along with his radar officer in their Self-Defense Forces Phantom when the aircraft had slipped out of their control and the canopy had refused to open.

Daisuke wields the _hashi_ deftly; his face is tense in concentration. House wonders if he's aware that his tongue is sticking out just a tiny bit. They've started with the small bones of the feet, and House practices the names to himself as Captain Matsuyama's wife and her sons pass the bones via chopstick express to the urn. He already knows from the _special culture_ classes his family's had to attend, that it's the only time Japanese people pass anything to each other using _hashi_.

 _First metatarsal, fifth metatarsal, talus, cuboid._

House shifts on his own feet; his "good" black shoes are a little tight and his dress shirt collar chafes at his neck. He wishes for a moment he had something to occupy his hands, like the _juzu_ beads some of the mourners are caressing, or even another pair of _hashi_ , carved of yew wood and lacquered smooth, that he could make twirl in his fingers like Keith Moon's drum sticks.

He tries to picture his mom picking out fragments of his dad's bones from a funeral pyre -- patella, phalanges, metacarpals, all the lumbar and thoracic vertebrae, and he wonders if between the two of them, they'd be strong enough to actually lift any of them.

  
 _(Three)_

The smell of incense reminds House of Japan. So do the mourners, shuffling in and out of their pews as they stand, sit, and kneel. The priest rings a bell, and House rolls his eyes and wonders if these Catholics could get any more Zen.

Not that he's going to be able to ask any of them that particular question, or any others -- he's having to lurk here at the back of the church just so Esther Doyle's children won't have him thrown out. And that's the ridiculous injustice of it -- he'd wanted to come to the funeral for the express purpose of _talking_ to the children and the other blood relatives, the ones who hadn't had time to visit Esther in the hospital because she'd died _so fucking fast_. He'd pushed hard, too hard, he realizes now, for an autopsy, and because of that and his own track record of not curing her the _first three times_ it had all ended in a very public shouting match in the hospital lobby.

So now he's stuck in the metaphorical doghouse, too far away to see if any of Esther's kids or her grandchildren or her sisters or brothers have any telltale signs, any outward genetic markers that might -- just might -- give him a clue as to what killed her.

House folds his arms across his chest and tries to look penitent. There's really no chance that just _looking_ will work, and yet he'll stand here and do it anyway.

It's the last thing he can do for his patient.

  
 _(Four)_

Wilson looks so _peaceful_ ; eyes shut, face relaxed, palms flat in his lap.

 _Oh no, you don't,_ House thinks, and jabs him hard, right on the top of the instep where the shoelaces are double-knotted in that annoyingly prudent way he has.

Wilson hisses in a breath. _"Ow,"_ he grunts, and that's good enough for House to put his cane aside.

"Not supposed to sleep during funerals," House observes, _sotto voce_. "It's disrespectful to the dead guy."

"Like you'd care about that." Wilson reaches up to make sure he hasn't dislodged his yarmulke. House waits a minute, then surreptitiously rolls his neck until he can feel that his is still there too, nestling against the back of his skull, the curve of his parietal bone. Wilson had told him he didn't need one, but House had picked one up anyway, twitching it out of the box at the entrance to the sanctuary. There'd been only a dozen or so there, most of them frayed around the edges, a few bearing the last loose threads of gold embroidery. The visiting rabbi's voice drones on, and House sighs and looks around.

"They call me when they need me," Wilson had said, and the reason they call him is clear; the congregation is eighty-five percent elderly women, and the few men present all look to be about the equivalent age of that percentile. There aren't enough male members of the congregation here to make up a _minyan_ , and the ones that are here aren't healthy enough to help handle casket duty. Those tasks will fall to Wilson and the nine other volunteers, all doctors, nurses, students and teachers from hospitals and Hillel organizations nearby. The synagogue is old and poor, the last in what's now the warehouse district of the inner city.

It's not at all what House had been expecting when he'd intercepted Wilson's phone message -- _Required for service, R. Sarah_

 _Sarah_ had turned out to be Rabbi Sarah Chumkin, and the service ...

"You didn't have to come, you know," Wilson whispers.

"Don't be an idiot," House mumbles. "You were already worn out from a sixty-hour week. You might have driven yourself into a tree, and who'd buy me lunch then?"

The visiting cantor begins to sing, his deep baritone imbuing the ancient words with sombre grace. The yarmulke is warm on House's scalp.

"I'll send Taub next time," he says.

  
 _(Five)_

"How does it feel, you bastard," House murmurs, "looking Death in the eye?"

Behind him, he can hear the rustles, the murmurs, the tiny evidences of human noise that occur even when people are trying to be quiet. Respectful. Funereal. Everybody's back there -- officers of the Corps, his dad's friends, his mom. Wilson.

House's lips are close enough to touch his dad's forehead, and so he does, barely brushing the cold skin.

What's his mom going to get from this? A folded-up flag. Rifle shots echoing in the sky. A handful of medals.

"Was it worth it?" House whispers. "Was it all worth it, you sorry fuck?"

His dad doesn't answer. He'll _never_ answer, and that's the thing about the dead.

The nailclippers are in House's fingers when he feels Wilson's hand on his shoulder.

 _"Put it back,"_ Wilson growls.

"But he's not going to miss it," House says softly, and it's true. John House is never going to miss anything ever again, and that's the best and the worst part about death.

Whatever Wilson says next, House doesn't hear it. He's still thinking about the dead, and their acquired immunity from life.

You can't ask them any questions, but sometimes -- just _sometimes_ , you can compel them to answer.

  
~ fin

  
 _Notes:_

The LJ-cut text is from the poem [Funeral Blues](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/w__h__auden/poems/10095.html), by W.H. Auden.

I've tried to make the details in section Two as accurate as possible -- we lived in Japan for a year and a half but never attended a funeral, so the sources I used are [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_funeral#Cremation) and [here](http://www.debito.org/japanesefuneral.html). If I've gotten something horribly wrong, please do let me know and I'll try and fix it.

  



End file.
